Inside Egypt

INSIDE EGYPT

ALSO BY JOHN R. BRADLEY AND
AVA I L A B L E F R O M PA L G R AV E M AC M I L L A N

Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis

INSIDE
EGYPT

THE LAND OF
THE PHARAOHS ON THE
BRINK OF A REVOLUTION

JOHN R. BRADLEY

INSIDE EGYPT

Copyright © John R. Bradley, 2008.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or
reviews.

First published in 2008 by
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European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-8477-7
ISBN-10: 1-4039-8477-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradley, John R., 1970–

Inside Egypt : the land of the Pharaohs on the brink of a revolution / John R. Bradley.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-4039-8477-8
1. Egypt—Politics and government—1952–1970. 2. Egypt—Politics and government—
1970–1981. 3. Egypt—Politics and government—1981– 4. Egypt—Social conditions—
1952–1970. 5. Egypt—Social conditions—1970–1981. 6. Egypt—Social conditions—1981–
I. Title.
DT107.83.B665 2008
962.05’5—dc22

2007050070

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Letra Libre

First edition: May 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

1. A Failed Revolution 1
2. The Brothers 49
3. Sufis and Christians 81
4. The Bedouin 101
5. Torture 117
6. Corruption 147
7. Lost Dignity 169
8. Egypt After Mubarak 201

A Note on Sources 231
Index 233

for Kelvin





INSIDE EGYPT



CHAPTER ONE

A FAILED
REVOLUTION

Ashort walk from the American University in Cairo, through the
bustling downtown streets of Africa’s largest—and the Arab
world’s most populous—capital city, is a shabby little café called
Al-Nadwa Al-Saqafiya. A hangout for Cairo’s embattled com-
munity of liberal intellectuals, its wooden chairs and tables spill onto the
street outside. The animated voices of customers compete with the constant
honking of car horns; the orders operatically delivered by white-jacketed
waiters are met with a chorus from nearby street vendors’ repetitive cries.
Smoke from the water pipes intermingles with exhaust fumes from the
gridlocked traffic. It is a microcosm of contemporary Cairo: traffic conges-
tion, noise pollution, and a social vibrancy created by a people who, despite
the chaos engulfing them (or perhaps because of it), love nothing more
than to engage in animated debate in public spaces about the trivial and the
profound. In the winter of 2006, a movie called The Yacoubian Building was

1

INSIDE EGYPT

taking Egypt by storm as I made my way to Al-Nadwa Al-Saqafiya to meet
up with Alaa Al-Aswany, author of the novel of the same name on which
the movie was based. The most expensive Egyptian film ever produced, it
features many of the country’s established stars, and in its opening weeks
broke all Egyptian box-office records. Set in a once-grand apartment
block in the historic downtown district of Cairo, not far from Al-Nadwa
Al-Saqafiya, the kaleidoscope of characters represent the various strata of
Egypt’s complex society. A central character is the building itself. It is a
poor shadow of the splendor of its 1930s and 1940s’ heyday, during what
is known as Egypt’s belle époque. The building’s deterioration points to
Egypt’s own sad, steady fall from grace during the more than five decades
of military rule since the July 1952 coup that overthrew the British-
backed monarchy and brought to power Gamal Abdul Nasser and the Free
Officers. With its near-barren cultural landscape, where the once-great
but now heavily censored cinema industry churns out endless slapstick
comedies, the movie exposes with unusual eloquence the grim reality that
daily confronts Egyptians. Sexual decadence and political corruption per-
meate the world in which the characters move. Pimps, whores, petty trick-
sters, and professional con men with high connections vie for a share of
the spoils of a declining nation now suffering the nightmare of a twin
curse: free-fall privatization from above and the spread of Islamization
from below. The rich in this portrayal of Egypt get ever richer, and the
poor ever poorer. The middle class, meanwhile, has all but disappeared—
and along with it any hope of social advancement based on a good educa-
tion and a willingness to work hard. Radical Islamists prey on the
vulnerable and the destitute abandoned by the system. The urbane and
educated are trampled underfoot by mafia-like thugs known in Arabic as
the “war rich”—better translated into English as “fat cats.” This is a coun-
try from which almost all the young people long to escape, their last hope

2

A FAILED REVOLUTION

for a better future to leave their loved ones and travel in search of work
and dignity.

Each Thursday Al-Aswany would meet up at Al-Nadwa Al-Saqafiya with
friends, fellow intellectuals, and admirers of his novel to discuss the latest
political and cultural developments in Egypt. Admirers he had aplenty.
Even before the dramatic success of the movie made his name as an author
internationally, The Yacoubian Building had been the best-selling novel in
Egypt and the wider Arab world since its publication in 2002. Many had
gone so far, somewhat prematurely, as to crown Al-Aswany the successor to
Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian author and Nobel Prize winner. Mah-
fouz, whose novels were also made into popular movies, died in a Cairo
hospital in 2006 after a long illness following an assassination attempt in
the early 1990s by an Islamist extremist, which had left him unable to
write. In his late forties, with the neck and forearms of a prizefighter, Al-
Aswany’s name indicates that his family originates from the magnificent
southern Egyptian city of Aswan, the Nubian heartland. His is an unpre-
tentious, welcoming manner, suggesting (again like Mahfouz) that he had
not let his newfound fame go to his head. He has lived in America and
France, and is fluent in English, Spanish, and French, in addition to his na-
tive Arabic. A dentist by profession, he set up his first practice in the
eponymous building in downtown Cairo that is fictionalized in the novel.
Oddly for a dentist, but like most of the Egyptian men I have met, he is a
chain-smoker. As I introduced myself, to break the ice he cracked a joke
about cross-cultural integration—the theme of his latest novel, Chicago—
after noticing that I smoke the local brand Cleopatra while he clutched two
packets of his preferred American cigarettes.

3

INSIDE EGYPT

There were about fifty people gathered at the coffee shop that chilly
evening in the winter of 2006. I sat in the back row, an observer rather than
a participant. They passed around a microphone hooked up to an ampli-
fier that allowed each to be heard above the traffic din outside. The discus-
sion, which Al-Aswany opened with a short speech, was dominated by the
fallout from a recent comment by Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. He had
said that the wearing of the veil, ubiquitous in Egypt since the early 1990s
and resisted now only by the country’s Coptic Christian minority, was a
sign of “backwardness.” The backlash against Hosni had been as tedious as
it was merciless, proving nothing more, it struck me, than the validity of
his assertion. Muslim Brotherhood MPs joined those of President Hosni
Mubarak’s own ruling (and ostensibly secular) National Democratic Party,
which dominates the legislative assemblies formed on the back of what
many, including the opposition, claim are fixed elections, in calling for
Hosni’s resignation. Columnists in pro-government and opposition news-
papers alike launched vicious ad hominem attacks on the culture minister.
Some suggested slyly (and with no apparent reason) that a man who
seemed to have little interest in women should be the last person to express
a strong opinion on what they were wearing. On the surface, this may seem
an unlikely alliance of Islamist and secular forces, not least since the
regime is routinely accused of imprisoning and torturing opposition ac-
tivists and persecuting without mercy especially the fundamentalist Mus-
lim Brotherhood. However, looked at more closely, the reaction to Hosni’s
comments nicely illustrates how the regime is stealing the clothes of the Is-
lamists to shore up its ever-dwindling support among the masses. It is a
practice that not incidentally has the benefit of pushing progressive voices
still farther to the margins while bolstering an “Islamist threat” the regime
plays up to help keep pressure and criticism from its paymasters in Wash-
ington to a minimum.

4

A FAILED REVOLUTION

The comments expressed by those who had come to speak at Al-
Aswany’s informal salon were almost all supportive of the culture minis-
ter—not necessarily about his views on the veil, but certainly that he did
not deserve to be attacked. This revealed both their liberal inclinations
and also how out of touch they were with mainstream public opinion.
After all, if both the opposition and the governing party saw benefits in
making political hay from Hosni’s comments, they both believed that
the issue resonated among the people and could thus be manipulated
for political gain. What the café’s participants particularly could not un-
derstand was how an opinion expressed almost offhandedly by an indi-
vidual, however prominent his position in government, could cause
such a furor while stories of widespread poverty, massive unemploy-
ment, endemic corruption, and a universal culture of nepotism—the
themes of Al-Aswany’s novel—failed to stir the masses to anything ap-
proaching the same extent. The reaction proved to them the bankruptcy
of domestic cultural discourse and the Islamists’ hold over the collective
Egyptian psyche. But it also demonstrated the almost naïve sense of jus-
tice on the part of those attending the salon, as the furor over the veil di-
verted attention from the grim reality the people faced but can do little
about. It is no coincidence that slapstick comedies and manufactured
umbrage have great prominence when pressing issues are depressingly
unsolvable.

“I was raised here in downtown Cairo. I believe it’s not so much a part of
the city as an era that existed for more than a hundred and fifty years be-
fore the revolution, when Egypt was very tolerant,” Al-Aswany told me
after the crowd dispersed and we sat at an outside table.

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INSIDE EGYPT

For the liberal Egyptian elite from which Al-Aswany has emerged as a
key figure, the different architectural styles that punctuated Cairo’s land-
scape before the revolution stood for more than just the changing times
and tastes. They represented a period going back to the early nineteenth
century when Muslims, Christians, Jews, Egyptians, Ottomans, Armeni-
ans, Italians, and French lived and worked together in Egypt. The
cityscape became a model of heterogeneity. This cosmopolitan past is ac-
centuated in The Yacoubian Building, where the eponymous building,
which stands as a faded art-deco block in real-life Cairo, is transformed
into a relic of “the high classical European style” complete with columns
and Greek visages in stone.

Al-Aswany was himself exposed to the West at a young age. He has said
that a part of him is “essentially liberal.” His father was a writer and artist,
and Al-Aswany enjoyed a bookish and freethinking upbringing. “Whoever
wanted to pray, prayed; whoever wanted to drink, drank; whoever wanted
to fast, fasted,” he told the local magazine Egypt Today during the publicity
blitz surrounding the launch of The Yacoubian Building. He was eager to
point out to me that he should not be identified with any particular char-
acter in the novel. Indeed, his main strength as a writer is his Proustian
ability to show empathy with the contrasting viewpoints of his myriad
characters. At the same time, it became obvious as our chat continued that
he shared with his novel’s elderly aristocratic hero, Zaki Pasha, a disdain
for the drab reality of contemporary Cairo life, and a certain nostalgia for
the prerevolutionary period—all heavily qualified by his reservations
about the British colonialism that defined it.

“Colonialism is always bad. Whatever positive consequences it has are
not created for the benefit of the indigenous peoples. But it’s a fact that before
the revolution we had our tolerant interpretation of religion in Egypt, and
that’s why we were so cosmopolitan—we had people from every corner of the

6

A FAILED REVOLUTION

earth living here,” he reflected, before being politely interrupted by another
group of fans asking him to sign English and Arabic editions of his book.

Al-Aswany had previously worked at a newspaper called Al-Shaab, “The
People,” where he was responsible for the literary page. The paper itself has
an interesting history; having once been leftist it moved toward an increas-
ingly Islamic character that presumably helps explain why Al-Aswany no
longer works there. A generous interpretation of the paper’s shift is that it
sought to accurately reflect the sentiment of the people its name claimed to
represent; a pragmatic variant might suggest sales were likely to be better
once the leftist slant was eliminated. In reality, the shift was due to a loss of
faith, so to speak, in leftist answers among its leading lights. It led an earlier
hysterical campaign against the Culture Ministry for printing a novel called
A Banquet for Seaweed also deemed un-Islamic by the local thought police.
Al-Aswany may have felt some personal sympathy for Culture Minister
Farouk Hosni’s latest clash with the extremists on the issue of the veil (which
the minister survived because he is friendly with the president’s wife,
Suzanne, who refuses to wear it). For he, too, had been on the receiving end
of a similarly ferocious smear campaign in the pro-government newspapers.
Columnists accused him of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad” (officially a
crime)—not least because one of his characters is a fairly openly gay man
(homosexuality is quite common among Egyptian youths, but the subject is
not normally discussed frankly); and one scene in the novel describes the
brutal rape of an Islamist suspect by a government-hired thug in one of the
country’s police stations, where the rape of men and women as a degrading
punishment and a method of extracting confessions is routinely alleged.

Egyptians are the most patriotic people in the Arab world. This may
not seem consistent given that I have never come across a local who does
not despise his president to one degree or another, and that an international
Pew poll in July 2007 found that a staggering 87 percent of Egyptians (the

7

INSIDE EGYPT

largest majority of all the thirty-seven countries surveyed) were dissatisfied
with the performance of their government. At the same time, it is hard to
find anyone who does not love his country, take great pride in its past, and
have great faith in its people’s potential if given half a decent stab at their
future. The key to understanding this apparent contradiction is the recogni-
tion that while well aware of their country’s shortcomings, Egyptians never-
theless resent it when outsiders bring attention to them, and even more so
when fellow Egyptians wash their collective dirty laundry in public for the
benefit of a Western audience already perceived as being bombarded by
negative images of the Arab world.

I reminded Al-Aswany of this before I read back to him what he had
said about Egypt in the same interview with Egypt Today in response to a
devastating survey of the country by Mondial, a leading U.K. provider of
advice for foreign companies investing in Egypt and for those seeking
travel insurance. The survey had produced a wave of soul-searching in the
Egyptian media, and not a few knee-jerk reactions, after it ranked the
country’s service and tourist sectors a flat zero. “It has reached a point
where we have reached zero,” Al-Aswany told the publication. “The zero we
received by Mondial is a fair result, very fair, not only in the Mondial, but
in everything. That zero really should not be given to the Egyptians; it
should be given to the Egyptian government. The Egyptian government
should get a zero in all fields, not only in soccer, but in health and educa-
tion, in democracy, and in everything.” When I asked him about his re-
sponsibility as an Egyptian for the way the country is perceived by
outsiders, the principal readers of Egypt Today, he merely shrugged and
said: “It’s not my job as a novelist to ensure that millions of tourists visit
Egypt every year.” In any case, he added, he was certain that the lackeys
writing the columns against him in the state-owned media had been re-
warded handsomely by the government for expressing their “opinions.” It

8

A FAILED REVOLUTION

was this reality, he said, that should be the cause of national shame. The re-
ception he received from ordinary Egyptians as he walked the streets of
Cairo proved to him that at the grassroots level many appreciated his ef-
forts. Finally, he returned with a sigh to his central theme: “The problem
with Nasser’s rule was that it set up a system that was fundamentally
undemocratic, which we still have to this day.”

As though to prove his point, on the Thursday of the week after I met
him the secret police arrived at Al-Nadwa Al-Saqafiya shortly before the
salon was about to get under way. The owner was informed that the gath-
ering was illegal, the waiters were roughed up and ordered to stop serving
the guests drinks, and the electricity supply was eventually cut by the terri-
fied owner (a friend of Al-Aswany’s for more than a decade). From that
day on, this little dissenting group of freethinkers would have to find
somewhere else to express their personal opinions. Al-Aswany seems to
have escaped arrest (the fate of many lesser-known liberal intellectuals,
bloggers, and opposition political activists) only because his international
fame had grown to the extent that the regime, under limited pressure from
Washington and international watchdogs over its appalling human rights
and democracy record, had presumably decided that the inevitable outcry
in the global media over such an act of awful silencing would prove more
trouble than it was worth. Anyway, all but the most ruthless dictatorships
know that there is some benefit to be gained by leaving a few prominent
liberals to their own devices. They create for the outside world a false im-
pression of domestic freedom and plurality.

“Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt.” So remarks the
hero of The Yacoubian Building, Zaki Pasha, whose father was a member of

9

INSIDE EGYPT

the aristocracy that was swept from power in 1952, in a memorable section
of the novel. The movie, for the most part, was a faithful adaptation of the
novel, the regime’s attitude toward Nasser’s legacy and followers having
evolved to the extent of permitting tolerance of dissent. However, perhaps
signifying the limits still observed when it comes to direct, stinging criti-
cism of Nasser in more popular media such as film, that statement was
omitted from the movie. So was Zaki Pasha’s heartfelt elaboration on it in
the novel’s pages: “He ruined the country and bought us defeat and
poverty. The damage he did to the Egyptian character will take years to re-
pair. Nasser taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hyp-
ocrites.” Asked by Buthayna, his young and impoverished sweetheart (who
also deeply laments the legacy of the revolution), why Nasser is still loved,
Zaki Pasha barks contemptuously: “Anyone who loves Nasser is either an
ignoramus or did well out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids
from the dregs of society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. . . . They ruled
Egypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions.”

The Yacoubian Building was the most prominent example of an ongoing
cultural reassessment in Egypt of the 1952 revolution and contrariwise of
the prerevolutionary ancien régime, for so long dismissed by the education
curriculum and government-controlled media as colonialist and so evil
per se. The hugely charismatic Nasser, it is true, was worshipped by the
Egyptian masses until his death in 1970. In a way, it is not hard to under-
stand why. There were considerable short-term benefits of Nasser’s rule:
the final liberation of Egypt from foreign dominance; the expansion of the
education system; guaranteed civil service jobs for university graduates;

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A FAILED REVOLUTION

the nationalization of the Suez Canal and building of the High Dam; fairer
land redistribution. To say that the Free Officers were the “dregs of society”
might be something of an exaggeration; they certainly understood how ex-
ploiting resentment of the rich (many of whom technically were foreign)
and providing benefits to the poor would generate support. Perhaps most
important to understanding Nasser’s appeal was the sense of pride he gave
many Egyptians. This is notwithstanding the fact that he betrayed them
when Israel obliterated the Egyptian air force in a matter of hours at the
start of the 1967 war while the Nasser-funded Voice of the Arabs radio sta-
tion in Cairo broadcast outlandish claims of a stunning Egyptian victory.
However, even what were considered the short-term benefits of Nasser’s
rule are now a distant, troubled memory for all but the regime itself and a
small band of die-hard intellectuals aligned with various Nasserite parties
and publications. Now anniversaries of the revolution are a time for
lamentation rather than celebration, if they are marked at all, regardless of
a lingering appreciation, on a sentimental level, for Nasser as an inspira-
tional pan-Arab, anticolonialist, and anti-Zionist leader. On the day-to-day
level, a deep sense of stagnation instead pervades as Egyptian society im-
plodes and the regime abdicates Egypt’s historic role as leader of the Arab
world. As the Economist magazine, which covers Egypt more astutely than
any other Western publication, wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the
coup, the country “is not in the mood for fun.” Its economy and politics
are stalled, the Economist added, “with strife in the surrounding region
stunting hopes of relief anytime soon. Even so, the Egyptian government
has lumbered into action with pageantry, parades, and speeches. . . . The
fanfare is meant to boost national pride. But it seems instead to have added
to the unease of a country that has grown unhappy with both itself and the
outside world.”

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INSIDE EGYPT

What was the reality of Nasser’s revolutionary regime? An objective as-
sessment can only draw one conclusion: It led Egypt to military catastro-
phe abroad while mocking its own grand declarations of democracy and
dignity for all at home. Nasser was thirty-four years old at the time of the
coup and had visited only one other Arab country, Sudan, before coming
to power. He knew few Iraqis, Syrians, or Palestinians personally. The
basis of his vision of pan-Arab unity, in other words, was a fallacious
dream. It evaporated once it encountered reality in the form of attempted
or aborted alliances with other Arab countries, most famously Syria.
However, the cumulative effect of his military coup would still have disas-
trous long-term consequences for the wider Arab region. As Laura M.
James sums it up in Nasser at War: Arab Images of the Enemy (2006):
“Nasser’s coup would inspire a series of inferior imitations by cells of
‘Free Officers’ across the Arab world—in Iraq, a bloodbath; in Yemen, a
façade; in Libya, a farce.” Nasser’s decision to fight a proxy war against
Saudi Arabia in Yemen in the 1960s, sending thirty thousand of Egypt’s
best soldiers to the southern Arabian tribal country and thus leaving
Egypt defenseless in 1967, was not only a tactical military miscalculation;
it was also strikingly hypocritical, coming from a man who had railed
against foreign interference in his own country, and who would place
pan-Arab unity at the top of his foreign policy agenda. Then again,
hypocrisy was a trademark Nasser characteristic from the outset. If the
CIA was not behind the “anti-imperialist” coup, it certainly had fore-
knowledge of it. Nasser then proved himself perfectly willing to work with
the Americans until they turned against him. Even his celebrated land re-
form laws formed a key part of a U.S. foreign policy strategy at the time,
which aimed to prevent the regional spread of communism.

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A FAILED REVOLUTION

Back in Egypt, Nasser, like a petty village leader, promoted his cronies
according to their personal loyalty rather than on their merits. Abdel
Hakim Amer is the most infamous example. Made Egypt’s chief of staff
and subsequently Nasser’s first vice president, Amer proved incompetent
beyond measure. Nasser got rid of him only after his military advice, based
on fanciful speculation and an eternal eagerness to please his old friend
rather than risk offending him by bringing home ugly truths, led Egypt to
defeat in 1967. The officers around Nasser, Amer, and other coup leaders
had quickly formed circles of power that put all their efforts into the
wrestling match for control that ensued. These new corrupt elites had
none of the positive attributes of the former decadent, but culturally so-
phisticated, aristocracy they had replaced and humiliated. From their new
positions of power, they did what such people have ever done: trade on
their influence, extort their share of every import and export deal from
arms to lemons, and profit from appropriations (read: theft) of real es-
tate—all in the name of the republic and its people.

That was just the beginning. The press, which had enjoyed considerable
freedom for more than a half century under the British-backed monarchy,
was nationalized in 1960 after years of coercion. The loyal “editors in
chief ” Nasser personally appointed to established newspapers became
more royal than the royals. Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, made editor of
the biggest-selling daily, Al-Ahram, founded in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, would emerge as the most famous Egyptian journalist. His weekly
Friday column was essential reading for those eager to know what Nasser
himself was thinking. This fact alone is a terrible indictment of the print
media of the period. Heikal, many claimed, was little more than Nasser’s

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INSIDE EGYPT

chief propagandist and censor, no matter how elegant a phrase he could
turn out. He and the other editors were accused of cutting out the heart of
Egypt’s great dailies. The official government-run papers continue to be
published today with the obligatory front-page banner headline celebrat-
ing Mubarak’s latest inane pronouncement on domestic or international
issues only because an arbitrary government injection of funds and a near-
monopoly on advertising keeps them afloat.

Nasser banned the opposition political parties that had similarly
thrived in prerevolutionary Egypt. The results were equally disastrous. A
one-party system was introduced. It ensured a military monopoly of polit-
ical power, with Nasser, who never stood for election, emerging supreme
after a bitter internal power struggle with the republic’s first leader, Gen-
eral Mohammed Naguib. Executive agencies set up to maintain checks and
balances in the revolution’s aftermath were, like the newspaper columnists,
easily intimidated. They, too, failed to offer substantive criticism of the
coup plotters’ excesses. An extensive security and intelligence apparatus
was put in place to spy on and control the masses that put to shame even
the spy network of King Farouk, the last, sad monarch to rule, and ce-
mented the officers’ iron grip on power.

Tens of thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded
in 1928 as a grassroots charity organization with the aim of returning the
masses to the fundamentals of Islam—as interpreted by the Brothers) were
imprisoned and tortured by Nasser, dozens to their death. Perhaps the
most famous was Sayyid Qutb, who in many ways laid the intellectual
foundations for terrorism that would later come to plague Egypt and other
countries throughout the Arab world and beyond. Those who survived the
purge fled to temporary exile in the ultraconservative Gulf states. There
they became immersed in the extremist Wahhabi ideology promoted by
the Saudi ruling family. Wahhabism is alien to Egypt’s tolerant, pluralistic

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A FAILED REVOLUTION

traditions of Islam, but the Brothers would eventually bring it back with
them when invited to return to the country in the 1970s by Anwar Al-
Sadat to counter the Marxist opposition that had emerged to Nasser’s rule.
Many of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who had remained at home were
hanged. The long-term cultural consequences of this imported Wah-
habism were tragic, especially for the country’s minority Christians. They
are damned—along with Jews and Sufis—as “infidels” by Wahhabi ideol-
ogy, if not by official Muslim Brotherhood policy.

However, the extent to which the Free Officers were prepared to crush
even nonradical, secular rivals in the name of the people’s liberation was
made evident when the leaders of a workers’ protest were swiftly tried and
executed in the months following the coup. The show trial sent a clear
message to anyone who might dare to offer a voice of dissent.

Within a few years, then, Nasser had laid the foundations of a brutal
police state ruled by a military dictatorship that selected someone from its
own ranks as president with almost total power. Egypt has remained under
some form of emergency law (which is to say military rule) for all but eight
of the years since 1952. According to Amnesty International, eighteen
thousand people are at present being held in Egypt without charge. A
pledge in 2007 finally to do away with the emergency law was met with
universal derision, because the regime introduced simultaneous changes to
the constitution that made its worst aspects permanent. As that cynical
maneuver shows, the Mubarak-led military regime is a devoted student of
the Nasser school. This is manifested most obviously in its reluctance to
risk losing power by making the country’s institutions truly democratic
and thus giving free rein to public opinion, especially now that public
opinion often finds its noisiest expression (through the regime’s own fault)
in the sort of vicious hatemongering that Islamist fundamentalists every-
where substitute for genuine debate. The institutions are still largely run by

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INSIDE EGYPT

figures who served their political apprenticeship in the regime prior to
Nasser’s death.

Leaving no doubt as to where his own personal loyalties lie, Mubarak
described the revolution as “the crowning glory of the Egyptian people’s
struggle” when he marked its fiftieth anniversary in a speech to graduates
of his alma mater: the Cairo Military Academy.

Thus, the mechanisms of this rotten authoritarian system established by
Nasser remain intact to this day, despite more than fifty years of dramatic
social and economic changes in Egypt. Unsurprisingly, a growing nostal-
gia for the period before the revolution that The Yacoubian Building mas-
terfully tapped into has therefore emerged. Liberal, Western-oriented
intellectuals and ordinary folk busy making ends meet alike now see it,
however romantically, as a lost golden age. The evidence is all around.
After the revolution the nonhereditary honorifics such as pasha (a high
rank in the Ottoman empire political system) and bey (one rank lower
than pasha) were banned, thereby signifying that traditional hierarchies
and deference were no longer in play. These, however, have been revived,
ironically used mostly by officialdom and the successors of the cadre of
ministers, high-ranking officers, and undersecretaries who had sought to
abolish all such “feudal” designations. The change in fortunes of such ti-
tles was made clear to me back in the 1990s. An elderly Egyptian woman
who had moved to Australia shortly after the coup, but returned for the
first time to help develop a curriculum at the Arabic language school
where I was studying, took me aside after hearing me address a passing
Egyptian I knew as pasha. She advised me earnestly: “He will get very
angry if you use titles like that!” Later, I asked my teacher if this was true.

16

A FAILED REVOLUTION

She chuckled as she explained that the old woman still appeared to be liv-
ing in the Egypt of the 1950s.

The negative changes brought about by the coup are meanwhile the
subject of an endless flow of books. One, by the respected Egyptian sociol-
ogist Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? Changes in Egyp-
tian Society from 1950 to the Present, laments the cultural, economic, and
social deterioration of postrevolutionary Egypt by contrasting it with
charming stories from the author’s prerevolutionary childhood. It won a
leading prize at the Cairo International Book Fair in 1998, and went on to
sell so many copies in Arabic and English that Amin published a follow-up
best-selling volume: Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians? From the
Revolution to the Age of Globalization. Amin is hardly alone. “I grew up in
the last days of the British Empire. My childhood fell in that era when the
words ‘imperialism’ and ‘the West’ had not yet acquired the connotations
they have today,” writes Leila Ahmed, a U.S.-based academic born to an
upper-class Cairo family during the interwar years, in her memoir Border
Passage (2000). One of many similar memoirs published in the West by
Egyptians trying to reclaim their prerevolutionary past, Border Passage
lyrically charts how many middle- and upper-class families saw no contra-
diction between their dedicated and often active nationalism and the fact
that they were eager to entrust the task of raising their children, for in-
stance, to Westerners, who presumably could hardly be relied on to en-
courage anticolonial feelings among their charges. Ahmed’s book taps
beautifully into a generation that grew up in a sophisticated and cosmo-
politan society, where one’s personal distinctiveness mattered as much as
one’s nationalist aspirations.

It was a time when Egyptian society’s undoubted inequalities and ex-
ploitative political manipulation by outside powers were somehow tempered
by the refined high culture of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism,

17

INSIDE EGYPT

and architectural extravagance the outsiders imported and the Ottoman-de-
scended aristocracy cultivated, and from which even the Egyptian national-
ist movement itself would draw inspiration as it emerged in opposition to
British rule in the late nineteenth century. Thus the great Egyptian national-
ist leader Saad Zaghloul, whose forced exile by the British in 1919 would stir
the masses into launching a mini-revolution that eventually led to partial
sovereignty, could say temperately of the Westerners in his country: “I have
no quarrel with them personally . . . but I want to see an independent
Egypt.” This controversial take on the prerevolutionary era portrays Egyp-
tians as embracing the best of what the world had to offer; being less overtly
religious than they are today, but more ethical; and correspondingly being
more respectful of the true, underlying message of Islam that finds its ex-
pression in good deeds rather than in the mere observance of strict religious
rituals and the endless issuance of obscure and often hateful fatwas. Islamic
scholars of the time, eager to merge Islam with modernity and democracy,
subjected even the Qur’an to rational inquiry and analysis.

Even King Farouk has been rehabilitated. In Ramadan/September
2007 a new televised miniseries charting the rise and fall of the king by fo-
cusing on his “human side” became the most popular program in the Arab
world and in Egypt for those who had access to satellite television. The se-
rial was produced by the Saudi-owned satellite channel MBC, and also
aired on the equally popular Saudi-funded Orbit channel. But it was ini-
tially not shown on Egyptian national television, for which it was report-
edly written some fifteen years earlier. The Egyptian government had
refused to fund it on political grounds. It is difficult not to speculate that
MBC’s decision to produce it, despite Egyptian officials’ efforts at hin-
drance by refusing to give the crew permission to film on location in the
royal palaces and other real-life locations, might also have been at least

18

A FAILED REVOLUTION

partly political. Columnists at Saudi-funded newspapers wasted no time in
holding up the supposed virtues of the monarch while praising their own
Gulf dynasties, which survived Nasser’s attempts to undermine them. Giv-
ing in to commercial pressure after the series proved one of the biggest Ra-
madan television hits in years, Egyptian TV announced that it would air a
prime-time repeat.

After that fateful day of July 23, 1952, the “Paris Along the Nile,” as
Cairo was lovingly renamed by the foreigners who flocked to the city and
helped to design, build, and run it during the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, was cast into the proverbial dustbin of history. Quarrels
rather than friendships between Egyptians and foreigners became the
order of the day. Indeed, the foreigners’ property was confiscated. Along
with the aristocracy itself, they eventually either chose to leave or, after the
1956 Suez War, were forced to flee. Symbolic of Nasser’s rank xenophobia
was his expulsion of half of Egypt’s Jews, endlessly linked in the regime
propaganda machine with the recently created state of Israel. This was one
of a number of witch hunts Nasser used (another targeting the Muslim
Brotherhood) to deflect attention from his own shortcomings, especially
in the area of foreign policy. In the case of the Jews, the process was hardly
undermined by the bumbling efforts of the Jewish state itself in trying to
recruit and fund a little band of Cairo Jews to carry out terrorist attacks in
the city in a bid to foment social strife and political instability. Still, if a
democracy is best judged by the protection it affords its religious and other
minorities, the fact that only a handful of Jews remain in Egypt, while the
words “Jew” and “Israeli” have become synonymous among Egyptians
themselves in casual anti-Semitic conversation, speaks volumes about
Nasser’s “democratic” legacy, as does the fact that Cairo’s main synagogue
is now surrounded by twenty-four-hour security provided by the army.

19

INSIDE EGYPT

The Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami has said that at the heart of
Egyptian life there now lies a terrible sense of disappointment. Ajami was
widely respected as an observer of Arab political and cultural trends but has
been criticized following his passionate advocacy of the ill-fated U.S.-led in-
vasion of Iraq in 2003. In a characteristically nuanced essay on Egyptian
nostalgia published in Foreign Affairs in 1995, he argued that the pride of
modern Egypt has been far greater than its accomplishments, and that the
dismal results are all around: “the poverty of the underclass, the bleak polit-
ical landscape that allows an ordinary officer to monopolize political power
and diminish all would-be rivals in civil society, the sinking of the country
into sectarian strife between Muslim and Copt, the dreary state of its cul-
tural and educational life.” It is out of this disappointment, Ajami argued,
that “a powerful wave of nostalgia” has emerged for the liberal interlude in
Egyptian politics from the 1920s through the revolution of 1952, when
Egypt was ruled by a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monar-
chy—for “its vibrant political life, for the lively press of the time, for the
elite culture with its literati and artists, for its outspoken, emancipated
women who had carved a place for themselves in the country’s politics, cul-
ture, and journalism.” Some of this “is the standard nostalgia of a crowded,
burdened society for a time of lost innocence and splendor,” he conceded,
before adding: “some, though, is the legitimate expression of discontent
over the mediocrity of public life.” Egypt produced better, freer cinema in
the “liberal age” than it does today, Ajami concluded, while “its leading in-
tellectual figures were giants who slugged out the great issues of the day and
gave Egyptian and Arabic letters a moment of undisputed brilliance.”

This sense of hopelessness, and corresponding nostalgia, has deepened
in the decade since Ajami’s article appeared. “I don’t believe the 1952 revo-

20

A FAILED REVOLUTION

lution had any positive features, since democracy is still missing,” Awad Al-
Mor, the former chief justice of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional
Court, said on the fiftieth anniversary of the coup. “The greatest failure of
the revolution is the lack of democracy, which I believe led to our defeat in
1967. Egypt has never experienced a democratic government from 1952
until now. . . . The revolution embraced the slogan ‘Raise your head, my
brother, for the age of oppression is over,’ but it replaced it with the heavy
foot of Gamal Abdul Nasser, which kept people’s heads down.” That such
criticism should come from a pillar of the post-Nasser establishment is at
first glance baffling, although the judiciary has often proved to be a thorn
in the regime’s side: Nasser summarily sacked hundreds of leading judges
who raised objections to his authoritarian rule. By 2006, in fact, the coun-
try’s top judges, protesting en masse corrupt elections they were constitu-
tionally authorized to supervise but had been prevented from monitoring
effectively by the Mubarak regime, had become the unofficial leaders of a
nationwide protest movement that drew on all segments of Egyptian soci-
ety: secular intellectuals, students, labor activists, mainstream Islamists.
For a while it seemed that the regime was collapsing from forces opposing
its rule both within and without its direct spheres of influence, as Egypt
witnessed the most widespread public disturbances since the years leading
up to the revolution. This time, though, the strikers and demonstrators
were rallying against the political stagnation and crude brutality of Presi-
dent Hosni Mubarak’s rule. Like his predecessor (and successor of Nasser)
Anwar Al-Sadat, Mubarak is a military man, the latest guardian of the cor-
rupt, antidemocratic military establishment created by Nasser that still
grips the country’s civil society in its rusty vise.

However, while Nasser set strict personal limits on how far he was pre-
pared to concede control of the country to the British and then the United
States, nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956 in a brilliant strategic move

21

INSIDE EGYPT

that effectively brought to an end British colonial dominance of Egypt and
the wider region, these days Egypt under Mubarak is comparatively more
dependent on the United States, the new imperial power broker in the re-
gion. The late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who knew a thing or two
about the way Arab despots engage in wheeling, dealing, and horse-trading
in order to cling to power, once smartly observed of Mubarak that “he is
like a pay phone. You deposit your money, and you get what you want in
return.” That the Egyptian regime continues to depend on the indulgence
of America, which since a peace treaty was signed between Egypt and Israel
in 1979 has provided some $2 billion in military aid annually (which some
see as a bribe for maintaining a Cold Peace with the Jewish state), is an ag-
gravating humiliation for ordinary Egyptians. For a start, they benefit not
at all from the money as they see the gap between the rich and poor grow
ever wider. Perhaps more crucially in a country where national pride is so
deeply rooted, they also resent America’s crude military adventurism in the
region and their own leaders’ complicity in it. This is not least because of
their strong sympathy with the Palestinian cause, and the neoconservative-
led invasion of Iraq is widely seen by Egyptians as having been launched at
the behest of an Israel-allied cabal in Washington.

More than five decades after the coup, then, Egypt has come full circle.
The same grievances that led the people to rebel, and the Free Officers to
take advantage of that rebellion to seize power, are now at the root of new
street protests and bitterly expressed articles in the emerging opposition
media: an end to colonialism and its agents, and the domination of gov-
ernment by exploitative capitalists; an end to the disregard for social jus-
tice; and the need for a democratic system of governance that pays more
than lip service to the demands of its people. With the president’s suave,
arrogant son Gamal Mubarak, crown prince–like, widely perceived as
being groomed to take over the presidency from his ailing father, few can

22

A FAILED REVOLUTION

see any meaningful difference between the current regime and the monar-
chy it ousted five decades ago in the name of the liberation of the Egyptian
people. The nostalgia for the monarchy is not that different from the fun-
damentalists’ yearning for the purity of the time of the Prophet and his
followers, a wistful desire for a time better than the present when the pres-
ent is so dismal.

Even conceding the undoubted ill effects of direct or indirect colonial rule,
the current Egyptian regime fares badly in every respect when compared to
the prerevolutionary monarchy that Napoleon Bonaparte’s short-lived in-
vasion of Egypt in 1798 helped to create. Nasser’s coup got rid of every-
thing that was good in Egypt, and slowly replaced everything that was bad
with something much worse. Napoleon’s attempted conquest of Egypt,
and the humiliation at the hands of Britain that ended it, inadvertently
gave birth to the modern Egyptian nation-state. It would be developed
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along European
lines under the leadership most notably of Mohammed Ali and his grand-
son, Khedive Ismail. Mohammed Ali is often referred to as the “founder of
modern Egypt,” and his descendants would rule the country with varying
degrees of monarchical power until his great-great-grandson, King
Farouk, was finally toppled by Nasser in 1952.

After the French left Egypt, the army of the Ottoman Empire, which
had ruled from 1517, remained in the country, determined to prevent a re-
vival of Mamluk power and autonomy and to bring Egypt under the con-
trol of the central government. An aristocracy of white slaves, the Mamluks
had ruled Egypt as an independent state from 1250 until 1517, and then
stayed on as Ottoman subjects to form the leading class in Egyptian society.

23

INSIDE EGYPT

In the seventeenth century, however, they won back power. For two hun-
dred years they replenished their ranks through the slave markets, while
ruling through tyranny. In the chaos of Napoleon’s departure, a third po-
tential ruling class emerged. Caught up in the rivalry between the Mamluks
and the Ottoman government, they were made up of an only nominally
loyal Albanian contingent of Ottoman forces that had come to Egypt in
1801 to fight against the French. The contingent was led by Mohammed Ali
himself, a mercenary who had arrived in Egypt as a junior commander in
the Albanian forces. By 1803, he had risen to the rank of commander. After
consolidating his power base, being elected governor by Cairo’s powerful
religious sheiks in 1805, and being granted the title of viceroy by the Ot-
tomans, he made plans to eliminate his rivals. In March 1811, he did so in
spectacular fashion, having sixty-four Mamluks—including twenty-four
beys—assassinated after inviting them for an official ceremony. Thus he be-
came the sole strongman in Egypt, and was afforded a unique opportunity
to unite a country teetering on the brink of all-out anarchy.

One of Mohammed Ali’s great ambitions included the eventual detach-
ment of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire. However, he realized that to
achieve this goal Egypt had to be strong economically and militarily. He
courted the Europeans from the outset, giving away treasures to Paris and
London while negotiating first with one power and then the other. The
Ramses II obelisk stands in Paris’s Place de la Concorde to this day, as does
Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment in London. Working long
hours and personally visiting his pet projects, he set about building new
factories imported in kits from Europe, surrounded himself with clever Eu-
ropean advisors, and steeped himself in the high technology of the time—
laughing heartily, for instance, when shown how electricity worked by
being given a shock with a live wire. He cultivated the most talented men he
came across in Cairo, skillful and dedicated individuals with backgrounds

24

A FAILED REVOLUTION

as diverse as his own: Armenian migrants, Coptic financial experts. They
formed a new bureaucracy and military that answered solely to him. The
centralized rule, and the authority he had among his subjects, allowed this
Macedonia-born Albanian to undertake important initiatives that laid the
foundations of the Egyptian education system, revived cultural life, and re-
formed the agricultural system—the leader always looking to Paris for in-
spiration. Ideas about politics, society, and culture that emerged in
subsequent generations date back to this period; but even by the end of his
own reign, Egypt had a corps of technically trained bureaucrats and army
officers committed to Westernizing reform and Egyptian autonomy.

Crucially, Mohammed Ali promoted the growth of cotton for export to
the expanding cotton mills of Europe, revenues from which would fund an
economic boom under his grandson Khedive Ismail, who ruled from 1863
until 1879. Thanks to a stoppage of American cotton imports during the
1861–1865 civil war, the price of Egyptian cotton soared as Britain looked
ever more anxiously to Egypt to supply Leeds and Manchester. Flush with
cash, Ismail began to realize more fully his grandfather’s ambition of
launching grand public works: canals, land reclamation, urban structures,
and infrastructure. In one year alone he set about building four hundred
and fifty bridges, sixty-four sugar mills, and almost one thousand miles of
railway. He also established the General Postal Union, and telegraph wires
were erected as far south as Sudan; soon Egypt could boast one of the most
efficient postal services in the world. The country’s image as a primitive
backwater of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a class of slaves, was finally
shed forever, as architects, artists, politicians, and musicians were soon
flocking to Cairo and the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria.

Ismail’s visit to the Exposition Universelle in Paris’s Champ-de-Mars
in 1867 was a life-changing experience, and had especially dramatic conse-
quences for Egypt. “My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of

25

INSIDE EGYPT

Europe,” he famously declared soon afterward. He seized the opportunity
of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 to build new districts in the Euro-
pean style, with magnificent parks and wide streets and palaces to accom-
modate his European guests—wanting to do for Cairo what Baron
Georges Haussmann had done for Paris. He opened the doors of Egyptian
society and economy to many Europeans, and after the British took con-
trol of the Egyptian treasury (and therefore by default the country) in
1882, following a financial crisis they effectively engineered, hundreds of
thousands of Europeans flocked to Egypt and settled in Cairo and Alexan-
dria in search of fame and fortune. They established their own quarters
and founded and operated Western-style institutions. Ismail had literally
laid the foundations in Cairo, paving streets and long roads and building
gardens, museums, apartment blocks, theaters, French-style fountains, and
a world-class opera house (Verdi’s Aida, with a scenario written by Mari-
ette Pasha, was first performed in Cairo in December 1871). An essentially
European city grew up between Ataba Square and the Nile, and the new
Egyptian middle class spread northward. As Cynthia Myntti writes in Paris
Along the Nile: Architecture in Cairo from the Belle Époque (1999), residents
and visitors to Cairo could find “French and English bookshops, tea rooms
and sidewalk cafés, fashionable boutiques, art galleries, and department
stores. . . . Legendary hotels were built: Shepheard’s, the Savoy, the Semi-
ramis, and the Eden Palace. Later, cinemas and roller skating rinks were
added for local amusement.”

By the interwar years of the early twentieth century, after Egypt had
been granted nominal sovereignty by the British and was ruled by a consti-
tutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy in all matters except na-
tional security and control of the Suez Canal, Cairo became the most
cosmopolitan city in the world. But six months before the 1952 revolution,
on a day remembered as Black Saturday, anti-British mobs torched Cairo’s

26

A FAILED REVOLUTION

Western landmarks, including the Turf Club, major hotels, banks, cinemas,
and residences. Ismail’s Cairo was largely reduced to ashes, left smoldering
under a thick pall of smoke. Nasser’s Free Officers would hijack the popu-
lar unrest to seize power. When they did so six months later, they inherited
not only the wealth and corruption of the former elite, but also the respon-
sibility for rebuilding the capital city.

“Architecture is the art that so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by
man . . . that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power, and
pleasure,” wrote the nineteenth-century author, artist, and critic John
Ruskin. No one would more strongly endorse that sentiment in Cairo these
days than Samir A. Rafaat, a leading amateur historian and a descendant of
an aristocratic family. Rafaat, an utterly charming man whose conversation
reduces hours to minutes, has painstakingly documented the city’s archi-
tectural past over the past few decades as it crumbled before his eyes. Much
of his research was published in Cairo, the Glory Years (2003), which
damns “the socialist state” under Nasser and his successors as the city’s
“new and useless landlord.”

Given the present decay, overcrowding, and haphazard planning, he
writes in the book’s introduction, it may seem difficult to grasp that Cairo
was once an architecturally attractive city. But the period from the end of
the nineteenth century up until the 1950s “witnessed an architectural flow-
ering that was unparalleled, with a variety of styles existing side by side:
baroque, neo-classical, art nouveau, art deco, rococo khedival, colonial,
Bauhaus, Italian Renaissance, arabesque, and neo-Pharaonic. Altogether
this produced an eclectic riot of elegant buildings.” Between 1960 and
1990, in contrast, “almost all of the construction east and west of the Nile

27

INSIDE EGYPT

could be written off as void of any architectural appeal.” The new tenants
of the once grand buildings “retreated into xenophobia. Their civic re-
sponsibilities did not get out of the front door.” Under Al-Sadat in the
1970s a new policy of infitah, or economic “openness,” was promoted. It
further exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor and produced a
new army of overnight millionaires who helped form the second-tier rich:
“high fee doctors, bankers, and lawyers whose principal job these days is to
keep the new rich healthy, solvent, and out of jail.” Like the Free Officers,
they were men with no taste or vision or civic responsibility. They con-
tinue to flee the city for newfangled condominiums in self-contained,
soulless compounds springing up on its outskirts, manifesting there in
concrete a sort of urban Saudi Arabia of the mind. Meanwhile, the once
grand downtown districts have been left to decay.

“All I see in the heart of the city is decline, decline, and more decline,”
Rafaat told me as we sipped cappuccinos at a trendy café in Zamalek, an
up-market island in the heart of Cairo, once the center of old Egyptian
money and European high-class society but now largely populated by the
brats of the new “fat cats” with their flashy cars, superficially Westernized
tastes, and awful English. They live in the bland apartment blocks where
once stood beautiful villas.

The main post-coup problems came from a combination of govern-
ment legislation and social changes, Rafaat told me, especially in the early
1960s when the crowning socialist law of rent control was introduced.
“Supposedly everyone’s lot could improve and there would be housing for
all,” he explained. “But few people’s lot has improved, and there still isn’t
housing for all. The only clear result is the absolute and total deterioration
of our architectural landscape: from the landmarks and way people live to
maintenance and appreciation. Would you want to spend money on
maintaining a building if you have an up-market villa that will bring in

28

A FAILED REVOLUTION

less than $100 a month in rent—the ceiling that was set in the 1950s and
1960s and is still enforced today? Take the Sidki building here in Zamalek,
which has about forty apartments. Because of the rent controls, it brings
in less than $200 a month. Can you seriously expect the owners to take
proper care of it?”

In the prerevolutionary era, buildings were built in a healthy climate of
social competitiveness, he explained, as each owner wanted to have a prime
location and a distinctive façade that would serve to attract the kind of
people who could both afford to live there and have the kind of taste that
meant they would take pride in their new surroundings. “But in the social-
ist era, pride was thrown out of the window. All they wanted to do was
house people like rats. Anything would do. We moved almost overnight
from a period of eloquent and elaborate architecture to a period of imper-
sonal architecture. You had a brain drain as well, exacerbating the situa-
tion. It included the architects, musicians, composers, writers . . . most of
such people were muzzled across the board. If I’m an architect, and I sud-
denly find that the largest single employer is the public sector, which pays
piecemeal, I’m going to look elsewhere. Our best architects simply trans-
ported themselves to the Gulf and other countries such as Libya.”

All of this importantly coincided, according to Rafaat, with what was
to be the last flood of the Nile, whose alluvial rhythms had been regulating
Egyptian life since time immemorial and whose taming had a dramatic
impact on the Egyptian psyche.

“It was like we thought in terms of B.F. and A.F.—Before the Flood
and After the Flood,” he said. “It regulated everybody’s behavior. Then
Nasser built the High Dam, and we cornered the Nile. It stopped in Aswan,
and from there on became a canal. At the same time, we had new regula-
tory laws that started to govern our everyday lives. Supposedly free educa-
tion meanwhile led eventually to no education. Free health care and social

29

INSIDE EGYPT

security led to no health care and no social security. In the midst of all this,
creativity became a thing of the past. There’s been an absolute downgrad-
ing in every aspect of all the things that could have led to the improvement
and maintenance of a city like Cairo. What are we left with now? Well, what
floats to the top at the end? It’s the shit.”

Only very recently have intellectuals like Rafaat publicly tried to come
to terms with the decline, helped in part by the growing nostalgia for the
prerevolutionary period.

“There is no longer fear of talking about the monarchy, about how
Khedive Ismail did a lot for Egypt. But for so long these were taboo sub-
jects,” he said. “History for so long started and ended with 1952. Now we
can address history more objectively, and there is a lot of revisionism going
on. Historians are now much more professional than they could have been
even until the early 1980s. Before then, we were writing to the rulers, and
not to anybody else. Unfortunately, now it’s too late to redress the situa-
tion. The damage has been done. All we can do is try to salvage the very lit-
tle that is left.”

Rafaat’s father, Dr. Wahid Rafaat, was a French-educated constitu-
tional lawyer and leading member of the Wafd Nationalist Party that
briefly ruled in the 1920s, and which would be banned along with all
other parties by the Free Officers after they seized power. Arrested after a
bang on the door in the middle of the night and imprisoned by the Revo-
lutionary Command Council on charges of high treason merely because
he wrote a series of articles criticizing Nasser’s foreign policies, Dr.
Wahid was subsequently confined to years of house arrest. Later, when a
position became available at the International Court of Justice, Egypt
was the only Arab state to reject his otherwise unanimous nomination,
thus spoiling his chances. If Rafaat’s is therefore essentially a victim’s
narrative, it is nonetheless well worth listening to for the bird’s-eye view

30

A FAILED REVOLUTION

his family commanded. Still, I asked the son that just as there had been a
simplification of what the revolution was and what it achieved, was there
not a danger now of glorifying the prerevolutionary era? Was it not a
time when a tiny percentage of the population owned almost all of the
wealth, when a feudal-like system left the majority of Egyptians in ab-
solute poverty?

“It depends how you research it,” he countered.

Of course, in Farouk’s era there was a great deal of corruption, and nepo-
tism was rampant. But Egypt was moving from being an occupied coun-
try, first by the Ottomans and then the British, toward independence.
There was a great homegrown nationalist movement. There was a
process of evolution under way. If left alone, the nationalists would have
brought about much, much better results than the revolution—or so-
called revolution—that interrupted the process of evolution. Even
though Farouk’s regime had its share of corruption, there was in parallel
a sense and a feeling that things were evolving. The economy was im-
proving. The institutions of civil society were in place. Given the laws of
supply and demand, nationalists would have redressed the situation—
however slowly. But that process was suddenly interrupted, and instead
you had a brain drain. What is a country and its people without its cul-
tural elite, without the institutions that produce such an elite? We sud-
denly had a new elite made up of officers who had nothing to offer but
dogma and tunnel vision, who just couldn’t see the whole picture. They
thought they could redress the situation by using drastic methods. But
now there was absolutely no accountability, and so even more corrup-
tion. Because your mayor was appointed, your councilman was ap-
pointed, your village head was appointed, you couldn’t approach them
after four years and say: Look, you are accountable to me and I will not
vote you back into office. We had no say, the little man had no say.

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INSIDE EGYPT

The crumbling education system, for Rafaat, is now the root of all the
problems. Nasser placed great pride in expanding it, boasting that a new
school was being opened in Egypt almost every week. That was true. But
what use are a million schools if there are sixty or more students in each
class who are beaten by the teacher if they ask a dissenting question about
even the least controversial of subjects, while the teachers themselves are
paid less than the waiter in a local coffee shop, and all they do in class any-
way is engage their charges in rote learning and propagate official govern-
ment versions of history, religion, and politics? If all that sounds
far-fetched, consider this: In 2006, Mubarak intervened personally in the
case of an Egyptian student who failed her high school exams after criticiz-
ing the United States and her own government in an essay, ordering her
papers to be re-marked so the student could be given a pass. The story of
the young student was widely reported in the Arab media, and even de-
bated in the Egyptian parliament. She was summoned and questioned by
the authorities, reports said, over whether she was a member of a secret or-
ganization after it emerged that in her exam essay she accused Washington
of backing corrupt dictators at the expense of the needs of their people.
Dictators, of course, are fond of gesture politics, and Mubarak’s quick ac-
tion after news of the girl’s plight was leaked to the media had the effect of
distancing him from an embarrassing domestic scandal. But no amount of
arbitrary presidential orders can mask the fact that when it comes to the
Egyptian education system quantity has clearly come at the expense of
quality, and that the consequences for the republic are much broader than
the crude harassment of a poor student. As Rafaat told me,

The lack of education leads to a person’s total loss of orientation, of a
sense of where they come from and whatever cultural heritage they have.
You stop identifying with that heritage because you don’t have the mental

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A FAILED REVOLUTION

capabilities to understand and appreciate it. Lack of education means
that your history has become alien to you, and the end result is the city of
Cairo that you see today. There are calls from time to time in the local
media to preserve what heritage we still have, however much it’s a case of
too little too late. The truth is that we’re already in lost time. We need a
miracle. Anyway, the average Egyptian is so concerned with subsisting
from day to day that everything else—his heritage, his beautiful door, his
cleanliness, his role in the community—has become secondary to him.

Feeling somewhat depressed after listening to Rafaat’s gloomy take on
Egypt, it seemed appropriate that I should take up an offer to visit Ahmed
Okasha—the president of the Egyptian Psychiatric Association, former
president of the World Psychiatric Organization, and director of the World
Health Organization’s Center for Training and Research in Mental Health.
A few days later, I drove out to meet this pioneer of psychiatry in the Arab
world. He had recently opened a mental health resort on the road to Suez.
From a distance, it looked like many of the five-star hotels that have mush-
roomed off the desert road, but it spearheads the introduction of a new
type of psychiatric health policy that aims to remove the social stigma that
surrounds mental illness in Egypt. Set in a sprawling garden, it has a gym
and multipurpose court, and a reception area with tall windows opening
onto the garden, crucially letting in light from all directions to lift the spirit
right on arrival.

The man who greeted me was a perfect advertisement for the aims of
his facility. A rubicund figure in fine tailoring whose wide, beaming face
was topped by a gorgeously coiffed shock of white hair, Okasha radiated
well-being from every pore of his corpulent frame. As we took a tour of the

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INSIDE EGYPT

facility, passing intermittently one of the several likenesses of the doctor in
bronze and ink dotted around the hospital, I asked him whether he could
shed light, too, on the mental condition of less fortunate Egyptians after
five decades of brutal military dictatorship. He was only too willing to do
so, it soon became apparent. He began by making what he said was a cru-
cial distinction between mental health and the absence of mental illness.

“Health as defined by the WHO is the physical, social, and psychologi-
cal well-being of the individual—not the mere absence of disease,” he
stated. “To be mentally healthy, there are four requirements to satisfy: the
ability to adjust to the stresses of life, to balance between your abilities and
expectations, to give and not only to take and be centered around others,
and to be able to do something for your family and society.” Over the past
fifty years there had been a dramatic change in the psyche, he said, of what
he (rather quaintly) repeatedly referred to as “the Egyptian” in the course
of our conversation. “The Egyptian is historically known to have a very
cynical and sarcastic sense of humor. If he can’t find anyone to make fun
of, he will make fun of himself. He is known to have a high degree of flexi-
bility, and to be very region- and family-oriented. But he is very much
against extremism, fundamentalism, and violence. His resilience is excel-
lent. At the same time, all his motivations are altruistic—family-oriented,
society-oriented, or religion-oriented.”

But no longer, Okasha believes.

We don’t see a lot of smiles when we walk in the streets, and there are
many reasons for this. First of all, there is the poverty. Still more than 50
percent of Egyptians are poor—they live on less than two dollars a day.
Then there is overcrowding, which has a tremendous effect on the per-
sonality of the individual. Cairo is the most overcrowded city in the
world. Fifty-two thousand people live in every square kilometer. Nothing

34

A FAILED REVOLUTION

like this has happened anywhere else. Then there is the high unemploy-
ment, and the inability of young people to engage in free expression. Free
expression gives you mental health and self-dignity. Democracy offers
better mental health, but it has to be real democracy—which means
transparency, accountability, and the ability to change the ruling authori-
ties. . . . Egyptians now find there is no transparency in anything in their
lives, and there is no accountability. None of the thieves who are minis-
ters or other politicians are accountable to the poor people. We have had
the same thing since 1952: The army rules the country.

Mubarak, he said, is trapped in this mental environment.
“He has been there for twenty-five years. And now he says, ‘I am start-
ing to implement reform!’” he said contemptuously. “Of course it’s impos-
sible, because reform is a mental schema. He is unable to do it. Instead, he
tried to do certain things just to create an impression.” More dangerous,
Okasha insisted, is the creeping apathy that has taken hold of the Egyptian
psyche. “When you expose people to so much mental torture, to so many
stresses in life, they start to withdraw into a state of helplessness and hope-
lessness. This makes you indifferent: You don’t care about a damn thing. I
live in Egypt, they rule Egypt, but I have no relationship with them. Let me
give you an example: Those who voted in the 2005 presidential election
amounted to just twenty-two percent of the population. Even in Maurita-
nia you get a turnout of seventy-two percent! And there is the electoral
fraud here: The Egyptian High Court of Appeal found that ninety mem-
bers elected to parliament in the latest elections are there because of fraud.
This shows why Egyptians aren’t bothered anymore who rules them.”
Okasha concluded that this climate of fraudulence has also taken over
religion. “Egyptians have reduced religion to rituals, including covering the
head, praying, going on pilgrimage . . . but deep inside, the faith is not

35

INSIDE EGYPT

strong, because they lie and embezzle and behave unethically,” he said, pos-
ing briefly next to a display of framed caricatures of himself published in
the Egyptian newspapers over the decades.

Yet Islam is a religion of peace, nonviolence, and mercy. What is the root
of this? Since ancient times, the Egyptian has been known as a man who
never leaves his place. His honor is his land. But after the 1952 revolu-
tion, and after all the economic crises, he was forced to leave, to go to
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in search of work. When you abandon a little
of your honor, this affects your ethics. Before 1967, Nasser had given the
Egyptian people some pride. But then the war turned out to be a fiasco,
whatever they said at the time, and the people decided: We have no faith
in what these people say, and so we’ll go back to God. We’ll think about
the afterworld, because here there is no hope—although Islam tells you
that you should enjoy life as if you were going to live forever, and you
should behave as though you will die tomorrow.

Okasha does not share the pervasive nostalgia for the days before the
revolution, considering it a dangerous delusion. “People who instead turn
back to a past era, like that under King Farouk, were not alive at the time,”
he pointed out. “They think there was more free expression and more
democracy. But let’s not forget that 0.5 percent of everything in Egypt was
owned by a certain class of people. There was free expression, and we cer-
tainly didn’t have an emergency law. And it’s true that the aesthetic appre-
ciation of Egyptians has deteriorated tremendously since the revolution.
But I’m very much against those who harp on the past, and I think it’s
completely wrong to compare the present to a distant past.”

So what of the future? What are the chances that the present chaos and
despair will somehow turn out to be constructive? Or should we abandon
all hope of progress?

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A FAILED REVOLUTION

I would prefer to think that there will be some kind of constructive
chaos. As long as the cognitive schemata of the present policy makers re-
main as they are now, I don’t think we can progress and it will become
mass chaos. But I can see from the mass media, the newspapers, from
new intellectuals, that there is some hope that they will force the policy
makers to change. My own belief is that as long as the policy leaders lack
transparency, accountability, and change of authority, there will be chaos.
Either there will be a coup d’état, or we will have Muslim extremism.
Then again, there could be peaceful change brought about by political
parties. We have to understand that the people in the National Demo-
cratic Party are Egyptians. When you sit with them, they speak as we are
speaking now. But they can’t act, because it is the armed forces who really
rule, and if you speak out against them you get imprisoned. In any case,
leadership means selecting the right people to help you do the job prop-
erly. Unfortunately, there is a triad of power, money, and authority. If you
have one of these, you have the other two—and you don’t want to give
any of them up.

It was almost as if a wistful note had crept into his voice.

Like so many other regime initiatives, a longstanding family-planning
campaign has yielded at best patchy results—much like ongoing attempts
to end the near-universal practice of female genital mutilation in accor-
dance with official fatwas declaring the practice un-Islamic, and eradicat-
ing mass illiteracy under a self-congratulatory national book-reading
program led by the president’s media-friendly wife, Suzanne. The 2006 na-
tional census revealed that an Egyptian is born every twenty-three seconds,
pushing the total population, including those living abroad, to seventy-six

37

INSIDE EGYPT

million, an increase of 37 percent over the 1996 census figure. That means
one in four Arabs is now an Egyptian. Cairo’s present population alone is
estimated at close to twenty million, compared to just half a million at the
turn of the twentieth century; the latest census showed that the capital had
the largest recent population growth (almost 11 percent) of all the coun-
try’s governorates. The regime now predicts that by the year 2022 some 28
million people will be living in the capital city. Already it is home to 43
percent of the country’s urban home-based population, 55 percent of all
universities, 46 percent of all hospital beds, and 43 percent of all jobs—not
to mention the army of unemployed, a million and a half Sudanese and
Iraqi refugees, and a million Egyptians who must travel daily to the capital
from outlying areas to resolve a personal matter in the Kafkaesque govern-
ment bureaucracy. Cairo, it is clear, will continue to develop at breakneck
speed—and along the lines of every urban planner’s worst nightmare.

This chronic centralization can be directly traced to Nasser’s paranoid
authoritarianism. Working according to the philosophy that if you control
the head you control the rest of the body, he made Cairo the absolute center
of power, to the severe detriment of smaller cities and the Nile Delta and
Upper Egypt (to the north and south of Cairo respectively). The Mediter-
ranean coastal city of Alexandria, for example, the country’s second largest
city and Cairo’s only historic rival to prominence, is these days a mere
shadow of the city depicted in dozens of famous Egyptian movies dating
back to the 1940s, where young men and women found love while vaca-
tioning. Popular songs from the era laud the city’s cool sea breeze, the
beauty of its women, and how easy love flourishes, while Lawrence Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet paid nostalgic homage to the city’s extraordinary cos-
mopolitanism as well as the seedy, sleazy, and endlessly fascinating stage it
was then for the machinations of the great and not-so-great powers. Most
of the city’s famous expat-run restaurants and night spots are no longer in

38

A FAILED REVOLUTION

business, their owners long ago having returned to Europe for good. Only a
few faded, elderly people remain from the once prosperous expatriate com-
munity of Greeks, Cypriots, Italians, French, and Armenians.

Instead, the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood has more lawmakers
elected from Alexandria than from any other city. Where Durrell’s Protes-
tant and Orthodox-born heroes once held forth (at admittedly tedious
length) about the mysteries of the cabbala and celebrated the beauty of
their various mistresses, now the city’s five million inhabitants have to be
mostly content with memorizing the Qur’an. Gulf returnees apply their
newly learned Wahhabi doctrine with a vengeance, insisting that their
womenfolk bathe in the sea in a full abeyya and their children do not talk
to Christian Egyptians because, since the latter are infidels, it is religiously
forbidden for them to do so. Given this appalling social climate, the new
Library of Alexandria, built at a cost of $230 million in an attempt to re-
vive its fabled ancient predecessor (and resembling nothing so much as a
giant satellite dish), has unsurprisingly failed to ignite a renaissance of
scholarly acumen.

I was often reminded of Rafaat’s description of Cairenes as being “housed
like rats,” and Okasha’s tracing of the deterioration of the mental health of
the impoverished Egyptian masses, when I visited the family of twenty-
year-old Ehab, whom I had befriended on the train to Cairo from Upper
Egypt during one of my frequent trips up and down the country. A tall,
thin, and vulnerable-looking young man, he had been reading a newspa-
per in the train carriage I was traveling in. A young Egyptian reading any-
thing is enough of an oddity to draw immediate attention; and I became
more curious still when I noticed that he was reading the opinion (rather

39